I don't mean constantly telling them how great they are. It's about giving them the freedom - and responsibility - to make a real difference. If an employee finds work to be a place of constantly changing excitement, opportunity, and challenge, almost all other HR-related challenges will take care of themselves - and almost all business challenges, for that matter.
That is why at HCL Technologies (HCLT) we developed the management initiative we call 'employees first, customers second'. It has been responsible for fueling a five-year period of growth that has moved HCLT to one of the world's leading players in our industry.
I became president of HCLT in 2005. At the time, the unit appeared to be doing quite well. But I knew, as did many, that things were not quite as rosy as they might seem. In fact, despite our growth, we were actually losing market share, we were struggling to gain mindshare, we had high employee turnover and, to top things off, the industry was going in a direction that we were not. I saw the possibility of disaster ahead.
In the first weeks on the job, I spent a lot of time meeting employees and customers. I needed to better understand our organisation - how people worked and thought, what the challenges were, and where and how we created value.
I found that our customers valued one thing above all: the service provided to them by the employees who worked directly with them. This should not have surprised me, but it did, because I had assumed that customers came to us because of our technology offerings. Not so. These offerings were essential, but they were rarely a big differentiator. We did not argue that our core products and services were much better than those of our competitors - just as, in our commoditising industry, their products and services weren't much better than ours.
However, our customers did see value in the efforts of HCLT staff who worked closely with them, sweated along with them, came up with customised solutions for them, and lost sleep at night thinking about what was best for them.
I even had sufficient vanity to think customers valued the HCLT organisation - that they saw our company as well-managed and believed that our processes delivered value.
Foolish notion. I remember a meeting when an important customer came to the office to congratulate his HCLT team for a job well done. He shook my hand and said: "Vineet, you don't know how lucky you are to have such a great group of people working for you."
Formal processes made little contribution to our success. What mattered was what we call the value zone - the interface between employees and customers, where problems were solved.
People tell me all the time: "You can't really mean you put employees before customers. Everyone knows that, without customers, a business is nothing."
Of course that is true. I do not propose we do away with customers, ignore them, treat them badly. I only say that the job of management is to do all in its power to ensure that their people have whatever they need to create maximum value for customers. To do that, employees must feel valued themselves.
Vineet Nayar is CEO of HCL Technologies
HCLT in a minute: Staff 64,000 : Revenue $5.2 billion : Median age 80% < 30 years : Growth Rate 5 year CAGR >30% : Largest IT services employer in UK : Winner of Best Employer in UK award: 2007, 2008, 2009 : Largest Acquisition by an Indian IT Service Provider: Axon in 2008 : HCLT's management philosophy is taught as a case study at Harvard Business School.
